87 — Rear curtain sync — front curtain sync in flash photography

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #87‚ talks about the dif­fer­ence between rear cur­tain sync and front cur­tain sync when using flash with your cam­era. Basi­cally when using rear cur­tain sync, the flash fires toward the end of the expo­sure instead of toward the begin­ning of the expo­sure as it nor­mally does. This allows the blur that results from using slow shut­ter speeds to trail behind the sub­ject where it looks nat­ural. When using slow shut­ter speeds, you’ll gen­er­ally need to use a tri­pod. We also go over some basics on com­bin­ing flash with ambi­ent light.

Front curtain sync

Front cur­tain sync — Notice the move­ment trail in front of my hand, it looks unnatural

Rear curtain sync

Rear cur­tain sync — Notice the move­ment trail behind my hand, it looks more natural

Photography mixing flash and ambient light

Wed­ding cen­ter­piece by Dominic Fuiz­zotto — Dominic skill­fully bounces flash to add detail to the flow­ers in this lovely bright image

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Dominic Fuiz­zotto pho­tog­ra­phy — Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy in Mon­treal

Publicphotography.org — Flickr groupPublicphotography.org — Face­book group

Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

If you liked this pod­cast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

My Face­book pro­file — Feel free to “friend” me — please just men­tion Photography.ca
My Twit­ter page — I will fol­low you if you fol­low me — Let’s con­nect — PLEASE email me and tell me who you are in case I don’t rec­i­p­ro­cate because I think you are a spammer.

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) ¯¿½Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks to Benny who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast. Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board. Most of the links to actual the prod­ucts are affil­i­ate links that help sup­port this site. Thanks in advance if you pur­chase through those links.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the¯¿½ Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. |¯¿½Sub­scribe with iTunes |¯¿½Sub­scribe via RSS feed |¯¿½Sub­scribe with Google Reader |Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Photography forum image of the month — August 2010

Every month on our¯¿½ pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I¯¿½ve come to real­ize it¯¿½s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That¯¿½s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

I Got it! by Iguanasan

I Got it! by Iguanasan

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

The deci­sive moment — Igua­nasan cap­tured the deci­sive moment here; 1 sec­ond ear­lier or later and this moment would be gone.

Sim­plic­ity & Story — The back­ground is unclut­tered here so this shot is not busy and there are no dis­trac­tions. This makes the uni­ver­sal story of a boy (let’s call him Stan­ley) play­ing in the water with his shoe even stronger. The story is well cap­tured and it strikes a happy chord in all of us.

Com­po­si­tion — Stanley’s pose is very inter­est­ing to look at and helps make this shot. Despite the water drops every­where, this is a clean look­ing image. I am glad we can see some of the Stanley’s face here. Although I nor­mally like to see more of a face, there are always excep­tions and this is one of them. Stanley’s pose and engage­ment in the activ­ity are uni­ver­sal enough that we don’t need to see the full face.

Expo­sure is well han­dled here and the drops look great. My only teeny nig­gle would be that the boy could be about 10% brighter to my eye.

Sharp­ness — The over­all sharp­ness is very good here. Some of the drops seem sharper than the boy to my eye but for me this still works well. The drops are an inte­gral part of the story and since Stan­ley is not look­ing at us because he is engaged in activ­ity, the sharper drops work for me.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

Con­grats again Igua­nasan for cap­tur­ing this uni­ver­sal moment!

I¯¿½d also like to include these 2 images as hon­ourable mentions.

Somehow prickly by MoinMoin

Some­how prickly by MoinMoin

Krimml Cascades - Europe's highest Waterfall

Krimml Cas­cades — Europe’s high­est Waterfall

PDN PhotoPlus Expo — New York — Oct. 28–30, 2010

Just in case you have never heard of this trade show, it’s AWESOME. I’m going again (my sec­ond time) this year.

Basi­cally, all the man­u­fac­tures in the pho­tog­ra­phy world that you know will be there with their prod­ucts (some brand new), as well as plenty of smaller com­pa­nies that you will not have heard of. Those smaller com­pa­nies are super-interesting as many of them make niche prod­ucts. Reg­is­tra­tion is free for the trade show until a week before the event. The prod­ucts are shown on 2 humon­gous floors in the Jacob Jav­its cen­ter in NYC.

IN ADDITION — The Pho­to­plus expo also has an amaz­ing selec­tion of sem­i­nars (with well-known instruc­tors) that you can choose to attend if you pay for them.

Hope to see some of you there, and feel free to con­nect with me before­hand so we can meet up in NYC. Just as an FYI, hotels in NYC are crazy expen­sive. If you want to save a few bucks stay in east New Jersey.

Reg­is­tra­tion is here

The sem­i­nar sched­ule is here